If it Wasn't for Your Misfortunes
by RowenaR
Summary: She's a Ravenclaw. This war thing... that's just not in her focus right now. OC, written for my Holiday Fic Request Meme on LJ.


**Author:** RowenaR

**Rating:** K+

**Category:** gen

**Disclaimer:** Harry Potter, not mine, I not own, you not sue, etc.

**Summary: **She's a Ravenclaw. This war thing... that's just not in her focus right now.

**A/N: **Holiday Fic Request Meme. **rareb** asked for a Harry Potter OC that wasn't either of the OCs we wrote before in _Haven't Thought of You Lately_ and since I realized that we never really wrote a Ravenclaw, it was clear where the OC was in. It's been a while since I wrote anything Harry Potter, so I felt a little rusty. What do you think?

Anyway, as always: Not a native speaker, so please excuse any weird grammatical constructions, run-ons and typos. Feedback will earn you a cookie, flames will roast my marshmellows.

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><p><strong>If it Wasn't for Your Misfortunes<strong>

"_I see a ship in the harbour  
>I can and shall obey<br>But if it wasn't for your misfortunes  
>I'd be a heavenly person today."<em>

_New Order, "Blue Monday"_

It's just another day at the Ministry for Madeline Fitch-Boson, Junior Assistant to the head of International Magical Office of Law. She takes the Tube to Whitehall, surrounded by Muggles and the weirdest thing about that is that this is the most normal and relaxing part of her day. (Even with the inexplicable malfunctions. She likes to think it's something mysteriously Muggle that causes them. Yet she knows better.)

Muggles don't talk about the Wizarding War. They talk about football – Muggles _always_ talk about football, as if it were Quidditch – and a country named Rwanda, a Muggle named Bill Clinton and a thousand other things no one ever talks about at the Ministry. At the Ministry, the struggle is talked about, in hushed voices that seem to float through the offices. The Minister's stance is clear. The department heads' is not.

She tries to stay out of it, in her little office at the end of the corridor in the Department of International Magical Cooperation. It's not that it doesn't interest her, it's just that she has better things to do. Her superior, Willibald Worthingham, gave her the task of comparing the laws on the control of magical creatures, especially ungulates, in the European countries. It was his birthday present, seeing as he knows she used to be in Ravenclaw and loves nothing better than to bury herself in books. Literally, actually.

So when Junior Assistant Madeline Fitch-Boson reaches her office on this February day, she locks her door from the inside, puts a Silencing Charm on the room and starts to work right away. She can control three quills copying from various books that are turning pages over by themselves at once and she can even brew her first cup of tea while leafing through a tome on the Italian attempts at controlling the mooncalf population in the 18th century. It's a breeze for a dedicated Ravenclaw.

The entire morning, she happily works her way through Ministry Decrees and essays and standard works. In her little universe of books and parchment rolls and quills, nothing but pure and untainted knowledge exists. There are arguments and downright fights of course but they're on a pleasantly abstract level that doesn't demand a political stance from her. It's her idea of the Muggle concept of Heaven on Earth.

She could have gone on doing this for hours and hours… if there hadn't been a little memo that managed to slip through under her door. It's just a little note, stating that there had been a Death Eater attack in the outskirts of Manchester. The one she grew up in. It was a lovely neighbourhood, despite Manchester always having been a city heavy with Muggle industry.

There had been a public library, her favourite place even before receiving the letter that invited her to Hogwarts. It was where she went during the holidays, when her parents told her to go out and do something else than sitting around at home and reading. It burned down to its foundation walls in the attack.

They say that Ravenclaws value books more than people. It certainly applies to her. It's why reading about the most beautiful place she ever knew – more beautiful than the Hogwarts library, because the Hogwarts library was never the kind of refuge the public library she spent practically all her childhood in was – nearly makes her heart stop.

She sits there, with another steaming cup of tea slowly going cold and the quills clattering to the table and the books turning pages over at random until they stop, and it seems as if the room just grew a handful of degrees colder. There's no other way to explain the way she suddenly started shivering.

The shivering is not the worst, though. In fact, it's only the prelude to crying her heart out. It starts with shivering and her eyes growing moist and wet slow trails on her cheeks and it ends with sobs wrecking her, making her bend over and weep for her childhood having been burned down by stupid, uneducated bullies that should spend their days reading to improve their meagre knowledge of the world instead of roaming the country and killing books. Books… and people.

She allows herself another moment of snivelling and one last sob before she gets up and lifts the Silencing Charm. Talking war is an exhausting and bothersome undertaking. But if it serves to expand her knowledge on this war, then be it. She should never have neglected gathering information on it. She will start rectifying this. At once.


End file.
